4 Ways Yoga Can Help Reduce Stress

Yoga is a great way to manage stress naturally. Here are 4 ways yoga can help reduce stress.

I have been practicing yoga for many years. One of the reasons I got into it was to reduce anxiety. It seems like such a simple step to take for stress reduction, but it really does work on both a physical and emotional level. You don’t have to be a professional yogi to reap the benefits of yoga for stress reduction either. There are lots of yoga poses that are simple and accessible to beginners. I won’t be getting into them in this article, but I will leave you with some resources. Let’s look at the ways yoga can help reduce stress.

4 Ways Yoga Can Help Reduce Stress

It helps you learn to breathe more cognitively – A big part of yoga is breathing techniques which help you calm your mind and spirit. This reduces stress by lowering your blood pressure and quiets your mind by giving it something to focus on. Plus it can increase oxygen which in turn, increases blood flow.

It allows you to relax your mind and body – Yoga breathing techniques help you lower your blood pressure, but the poses can also reduce stress by creating a better mind/body connection. You become more aware of your body and how it feels, performs, and moves while also developing a deeper connection to how this makes you feel emotionally.

It releases hormones that help reduce stress – When we exercise, we have a release of hormones that make us happy and energized. Yoga can be a form of exercise and believe it or not, I usually break into a sweat doing it. This release of hormones can help us find joy in stressful situations and can also help us find more relaxation.

It helps you learn to relax even when you are not doing it – Because so much of yoga focuses on breathing techniques and meditative type practices, it can be useful as a tool for teaching us to use these same techniques when we are not practicing yoga. It can teach us to quiet our minds when anxiety pops up and can make us more mindful in general, leading to better management of stress in the long run.

If you are looking for places to start doing yoga for stress reduction, here are some great places to find poses, breathing techniques and more:

10 Yoga Poses for Stress and Anxiety from Care2

Yoga Journal website

Yoga with Adriene YouTube Channel